The folks that never quite manager to bring us the $100 laptop are at it again. This year the One Laptop Per Child group will be introducing an 8 inch tablet that sells for less than $100.
The XO 3.0 will reportedly have a 1024 x 768 pixel display, a Marvell Armada PXA618 ARM-based processor, and 512MB of memory. The tablet will be available with Google Android or Sugar OS, a custom Linux-based operating system originally designed for the XO Laptop.
Some models may also be available with a Pixel Qi sunlight readable display. Pixel Qi’s screens have two modes. With the backlight on they’re full color LCD displays. But if you cut the backlight, you can view text and images on the screen using ambient light — although they’ll look more like E Ink grayscale displays in that mode.
Like the XO Laptop, the goal is to position the XO tablet as a low-cost computing device for students in the developing world. The tablet is said to get up to 10 hours of battery life, and it can be recharged with solar cells, hand cranks, or other devices.
This all sounds like a pretty big deal — but a lot of these promises sound familiar. The XO Laptop was supposed to sell for $100, but its price never really dipped far below $200. OLPC also never released a long-promised hand crank charging solution for the laptop.
There’s some reason to believe that a $100 laptop is a more achievable goal though. Last year the Indian government started shipping $35 tablets to students in that country. They’re not very good tablets, but it demonstrates that it’s possible to make very cheap yet usable Android tablets given the availability of inexpensive supplies.
OLPC has been working on its tablet designs for the last few years and we’ve seen a number of concept drawings, but it won’t be clear exactly what the new models look like until we see them at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Update: OLPC has posted the first few pictures of the new tablet.
via ComputerWorld and The Verge
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7 Comments on "OLPC to introduce its $100 tablet at CES"
If anything, it sounds more promising than before because:
a) There are already pictures of it at The Verge, and it will be showcased at CES in a matter of days
b) OLPC claims that they already have orders from a couple of governments. Uruguay? I have read it somewhere today.
Anyway, it looks like the ultra-low-cost Android tablet is indeed feasible. The guys at The Verge also did a hands-on with a $99 Chinese Android 4.0 tablet and came away impressed.
For countries that never quite got textbooks, a tablet with free online content and custom apps can be a godsend. In the West, where textbook publishers are already entrenched and people are used to spending a lot of money on paper, it will be more difficult – kind of the way mobile phones have killed landlines in Africa, but not in Europe.
I think the OLPC people deserve more credit than they get. Not so much because they succeeded, but because they scared the rest of the industry into making lower priced laptops. Without OLPC I don’t think netbooks as we know them would exist.
The idea that each student can have their own inexpensive computer seemed far out, almost crazy when OLPC first proposed it. Now the technology is catching up to the idea, particularly with tablets. They were ahead of their time, but they had some good ideas and good intentions.
Note that Intel was part of the OLPC project in late 2007. That may have influenced their decisions about how to develop and price the Atom.
No need to add that note, I already indicated that with the part just before I said…
“So in that much the OLPC did have a effect as Intel was already
experimenting with creating lower cost and lower power solutions.”
But I also pointed out that netbooks started with the Celeron, the ATOM didn’t start replacing it till 2008 and both Intel and MS started imposing strict limitations on the netbook specifications.
It also doesn’t change that there were even earlier attempts at making netbook like devices, it’s just that the limits of technology at the time either had them too limited in function or too expensive.
OLPC can be credited for helping to accelerate the process, and getting many to start thinking out of the box for solutions. However, there were other factors and the OLPC wasn’t responsible for them all.
>Without OLPC I don’t think netbooks as we know them would exist.
This statement is true. It’s commonly recognized that the Asus EEE PC was inspired by the OLPC effort. Stated by no less than the Asus CEO Jonney Shih himself.
http://www.silicon.com/legacy/research/specialreports/agenda-setters-2008/jonney-shih-39295148.htm
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/17-03/mf_netbooks?currentPage=all